Take ownership of your ideas: An interview with Tim Pollock

Tim Pollock
Farrell Professor of Entrepreneurship
Smeal College of Business
Penn State University

Last year, Otilia Obodaru and Erik Dane from Rice University contacted me to ask whether I’d be willing to present at a PDW (Professional Development Workshop) they were organizing for AOM (Academy of Management Annual Conference) on the topic of “What constitutes high-quality writing in our field?” Otilia had read our blog, and thought it would be great if I could talk about it at the PDW. I was so excited that someone from outside our network had actually read our blog that I didn’t think to ask who the other speakers were going to be and I immediately said yes. Oh no! It turned out that they had rounded up a pretty impressive panel of people who were or had been associate editors in top journals, and who all had first-hand and extensive (rather than second-hand and fleeting, like me!) experience on the topic at hand. So here I was presenting side by side with the likes of Belle Rose Ragins, Joyce Bono, Kevin Corley and Tim Pollock. The word “intimidating” seems understated under such circumstances. It turns out that everyone was more than gracious. Kevin, of course, I knew (you can read his interview on this blog) and Tim turned out to be this super friendly guy with whom I was able to chat a bit longer after the workshop. He loved the premise of the blog, which prompted me to ask (it’s practically automatic now!), “So, would you like to be interviewed for it?” And so here you have it. This is one of two interviews I’ve done with primarily quantitative researchers (the other is Danny Miller). Differences anyone? Do you see any?

So why don’t we just dive in?

I was looking at your blog this morning. Some of those writing spaces are kind of stunning, aren’t they?

I know. Yours look pretty good though.

I like mine, I like mine a lot. (Tim takes me on a Skype tour of his office). We painted the walls this colour, and we tiled in here a couple of years ago. It’s nice.

It’s got beds for the dogs and everything. Very nice. Let’s start then with my standard questions about ideas: where do your ideas for papers come from?

Everywhere, really. Actually, the place that is the least likely to generate an idea for me is the literature, you know, the gap in the literature. I get my ideas from newspaper articles, magazine articles, conversations with people, experiences that I’ve had. So for example, for the paper on stock option re-pricing, I saw an article in Business Week. And one of my doctoral students from Wisconsin came into my office and said, “Hey, I just saw this article in Business Week on stock option re-pricing! And I said, “Yeah, me too!” And in this article, they talked about how there was this big drop in the stock market, and how all these companies re-priced at the same time because of it, which is really an uncommon experience. It was like: “That would be kind of cool, a natural experiment to look at who re-prices and why, and how CEO power influences that, and so forth.” Another example would be with Violina (Rindova). Violina and I were having a conversation – this was 1999, and I had this IPO data from my dissertation, and one of the things we’d talked about is that we wanted to do something with media. One of the observations that we’d made was that the media really treated these dotcoms like rock stars. And that’s where our idea for the celebrity article came from.

It was just like a casual conversation that triggered that?

Yeah. Like I said, I had this IPO data from my dissertation, and we were talking about what sort of issues we could look at. And that’s when our conversation turned to the world of media and what they do and we thought: “Hey, this stuff is kind of cool.” And so we pursued it. Actually, that paper was supposed to be a qualitative paper. We were going to do a comparative case study of six firms, three that were celebrities and three that weren’t, to look at how the media talked about them differently, and we’d actually collected data on that and Violina had started analyzing it when the dot.com bubble burst. Everybody was super negative about dot coms, and we were like: “Nobody is going to want to read our paper.” So we thought, “Maybe we can write a theory paper about this.” So we expanded our range of examples beyond dot coms and decided to pursue it as a theory paper.

So your ideas come from everywhere. But ideas are a dime a dozen. How do you pick one and say: “Oh, let’s go with that one!”

It depends on how much it excites you, and how much it excites your co-authors. You look to see if there’s been other stuff done on it, but in general at some point, you know the literature in your area well enough that you kind of know what’s been done and what hasn’t. You say: “Hey, here’s a cool phenomenon.” For me, it kind of starts with a phenomenon, and from there it goes to “What’s the theoretical question that we can answer with this phenomenon?”

So we’re talking about data-driven versus theory-driven inquiry. I had this conversation with Karen Golden-Biddle, and she suggested that the former was harder because the data doesn’t always fit the theory… you might end up having to dig into all kinds of different theories before you can come up with something.

Since I haven’t really done it the other way, I can’t tell you which is harder. I think though that the harder something is, the more interesting it tends to be. I also think that we rarely have the luxury of saying: “I have this idea, and now I can go and pick the perfect context.” More often, we get an opportunity to get data for whatever reason, or we have data available, and then we say: “Okay, what can I do with it?”

You’ve mentioned the word “cool” a few times. What’s cool for you?

For me, cool is something that gets academic geeks excited. It’s like, here is a question that nobody has really been able to answer before, or you’re hitting on a fundamental theoretical issue. So that’s cool. And then there’s the: “If we can get this published, reporters might pick up on it and we might see it talked about in the Wall Street Journal, or Business Week or Fortune or something.” So there’s that kind of cool too.

Let me come back to this question I mentioned before about “Do you have a favorite in your papers?” One that you’re particularly proud of and that you really like for some reason?

Well, the celebrity paper is actually one that I’m pretty proud of because in it we introduced a new construct to the field. People are picking up on it and talking about it and using it, so I think that one is one that I’m proud of because that’s a hard thing to do. Whenever you introduce a new construct you have to explain why it’s necessary. Why it’s not a subset of some other construct, or how it’s unique and different from other constructs – what does it explain that we’re not already explaining with other stuff.

Which explains your table in here with the four categories: reputation, status, legitimacy and celebrity.

Yes, that wasn’t in the first version, I don’t think.

It’s funny that you should say that because when I read the paper, I thought,“I’m pretty sure the reviewers asked him to put that in there.”

It’s amazing what comes up in review letters and how papers evolve as a result. I mean, in a paper I have with Harold Fischer on IPO firm survival, the thing that we thought was least controversial – we’re looking at how this transformational event for an organisation can increase the likelihood of failure, and how human capital and social capital affects a firm’s likelihood of failure during the five years after its IPO. The biggest issue we ran into with that paper is that there was one reviewer who didn’t believe that an IPO was a transformational event for an organisation, and for us that was never in question. And so over two rounds and a lot of revisions, we now have this big section at the front of that article about why this is such a transformative event for an organization, and none of that was there in the original version. And it was all because of this reviewer who wasn’t convinced, and the editor didn’t know the phenomenon well enough to know one way or the other.

So you’ve found this cool idea, you’ve decided that you want to do something about it. What happens next?

Well, somebody needs to take the reins and start pulling together some notes and push them out. If you keep going back and forth, and you keep the momentum going, then it can really start to take off. But on some projects, you like the idea but you aren’t quite happy with the angle yet, or there are other things going on. Those unfortunately can get kicked along the ground for a very long time.

What do you mean by they can “get kicked along the ground”?

Every six months, you’re talking about it with the other person and saying: “Yeah, we’ve really got to do something on that.” You might do a little bit more but then nothing happens, people get distracted, they’ve got other stuff going on. You know, an R&R comes in or whatever, and all of a sudden you realize it’s been a year and you haven’t done anything with the paper. You’re like: “Shit, we’ve got to do something here.”

Ok, so let’s say you’re the one who picks up the ball. What do you do first?

Well, first I start writing a summary, like a memo. I don’t outline. If it’s a theoretical paper, I’ll usually start with trying to flesh out what my propositions are. What will my general arguments be? To do that, I need have a working model of what the issues are and what the potential contribution is going to be, but it doesn’t have to be fully developed. With empirical papers, you probably have some kind of working hypotheses, because you’re running models, you’re figuring out what works and what doesn’t, what makes for a reasonable story. Once I’ve done some analysis and I have some working hypotheses, I’ll write them down. Then I’ll write a two or three sentence paragraph justifying each hypothesis – so in two or three sentences: what’s my basic argument? At some point early in the process I’ll also start trying to sketch out an introduction. If I can write the introduction, then I’ve got a picture of where the paper is going. So for me, the introduction is the outline. It’s not going to be perfect, but at least I’m starting to say, “Okay, here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know, here’s what our contribution is going to be.” After that, you’re iterating back and forth.

So you’re going back and forth, just like qualitative researchers…

But it doesn’t always work. For example, on our worth and words paper with Joe Porac and Jim Wade, we developed these main effect hypotheses, and a couple of the main effects worked out but most of the hypotheses weren’t supported, and we were like: “Okay, let’s look at some interactions!” And that turned out to be cool because interesting stuff came out of that. We didn’t rewrite the hypotheses but we did do a lot of post-hoc theorizing in the paper. So essentially, the theory was okay but there was more nuance in it than a simple main effect hypothesis. We found some interesting interaction effects, and so in that paper, the more interesting theorizing is in the discussion section as opposed to the front end of the paper. And I’m a big believer in that. Often as an editor, I see reviewers who say: “Well, all of your hypotheses aren’t supported or almost all of them aren’t, so there’s a problem with your theory.” And I think, “Well, no! That may be what the theory suggests, but the results suggest something else, and so the interesting theory is in the back-end when you’re explaining what happened.

This wouldn’t work for all types of quantitative research though…

That’s true. I do mostly archival research which is different. If you’re doing an experiment or a survey, you can’t do it this way because you have to figure everything out beforehand and know what hypotheses you want to test before you can design the experiment. With archival data, you can go back and forth. You can collect more data. You can say: “Oh, we need this variable.” And you go and get it – stuff you can’t do with other types of quantitative research. With archival research I have a little more flexibility to move back and forth between the theory and the data. You have to start figuring out: “Ok, what’s the theoretical question here? And it’s not enough to just want to explain the mechanism, but it’s also, “What’s going to make this interesting?” I’m always going back and asking myself: “Where’s the cool bit?” Because you don’t want to prove an obvious hypothesis. You have to know what the literature has already said, to avoid coming up with something that people look at and go: “Duh! I didn’t need you to do this study to tell me that.” You know? Because it’s too obvious and common sense. So you have to try and develop hypotheses that have a bit of a question embedded in them. You’re not sure what the answer is – you think you know what the answer is likely to be, but you’re not sure.

There’s still some doubt.

The null is still plausible. If you have an implausible null, then it’s not really interesting. And coming up with that nuance sometimes takes time.

When do you go from memo writing to starting work on an actual paper?

So like I said, the papers I write evolve out of these working memos that my co-authors and I send back and forth to each other. They’re these little chunks: here are some hypotheses, here is a 1 ½ page rough draft of an introduction, and here is a summary of what I think we said in our last meeting. So we’ll take the different bits and then just start fleshing them out. I’ll take those two or three sentence paragraphs and turn them into a page or two of more developed theorizing to support each hypothesis. And then it expands from there. Different people would probably be responsible for different parts initially and then we just trade and shift around, mostly through email.

So you have this bricolage of bits and pieces which you’ve put into a document, and then you just expand on them?

Yes, the memos have been cut and pasted into a main document, and then you take one bit and just blow it up.

Do you jump around when you do that, or do you go through each part of the document more systematically?

I’ll probably spend more time rewriting the introduction than anything else. And that’s largely because one of the things that I’ve learned, and this was actually confirmed in that survey I did with Adam (Grant), I would say that at least half of the decisions about whether or not to give a paper an R&R or a reject are made once a reviewer or the editor has read the first few pages of the paper. So after they’ve read the introduction basically. Because at that point, it’s like: “Okay, this is cool, I want to know more, I’m looking for reasons to say yes”, or “Okay this is… – how long is it?” In which case they’re looking for reasons to say no. So the introduction is critical. If you don’t sell to people why your study is interesting, what you’re contributing, if you don’t get people excited and cheering for you and wanting to say yes, you’re dead.

So no short cuts on introductions then! Let’s talk a little bit about some of the more idiosyncratic writing habits that you might have.

I don’t have any rituals or things that I have to do to prepare to write – I like to write in the morning, I’m better in the morning. I can write pretty much at any time of the day, but generally morning and mid-afternoon are when I’m at my best. That’s when I like to try and do most of my writing, especially if it’s what I call “new” writing. There’s a big difference between re-writing and getting that new stuff out. Writing new stuff is a lot more cognitively taxing, so I can do that for less time and it takes longer. That kind of writing I like to do earlier in the day. Re-writing on the other hand, I can do almost any time or anywhere because now you’re only adding or adjusting. It’s not, “Okay, I have to write this section, it’s all just a blank screen, what am I going to say?”

How much time would you set aside to get “new” writing done then?

I don’t set an amount of time. If I have the luxury of two or three hours, that’s great.

Two or three hours is a luxury?

Yes, because there’s always other stuff that you’ve got to do, especially in the last few years. There’s a lot of writing that we do that isn’t writing papers. We’re writing reviews, decision letters, recommendation letters, other letters, whatever. These other kinds of writing I can do in a wider variety of places. I don’t like working on a paper, especially one that involves new writing, when I don’t have access to the internet because I want to be able to get articles when I need them. But re-writing and certainly writing reviews and decision letters, I’ve done a lot of on planes and in airports. To me, those are perfect places to do those things because you’ve got this down-time, and you’re relatively isolated. As long as I don’t have somebody who decides he needs to be reclined back in his seat the entire flight in front of me, I’m okay. When I was active as an AE (associate editor), every plane trip I took, I wrote at least one decision letter.

Any other habits you’d like to share?

I don’t like to listen to music or have other stuff going on while I’m writing. I tend to like it quiet. Especially music with words. When you’re trying to write words and you hear words, it’s hard for me to tune it out. One thing that actually really helps me is having the dogs, and the fact that my wife also works at home. Her studio is upstairs. She’s painting, and I get these built-in breaks because I’ve got to walk the dogs, we’re going to stop for lunch. Sometimes, she asks me to come up and take a long at what she’s working on. Things like dog walking or mowing the lawn, I find really helpful because they’re physical but they don’t require a lot of cognitive energy. So there have been lots of times where I’ve been working on something and I’m stuck, so I’ll go for a dog walk, and in the middle my walk, the answer would come to me. And it wasn’t as if I was actively thinking about it. So having those breaks and doing something physical really helps.

Is that one of the ways you deal with writers’ block?

I’ve never had writer’s block.

Never, okay! How is that?

My lips keep moving, my fingers keep moving, even when there’s nothing productive coming out (Tim laughs). To me, writing is like a puzzle that needs to be solved. So I just keep at it until I’ve figured it out. There are times where I’m cognitively overloaded. I have so much other stuff going on, I don’t feel like I can actually focus on a paper. To me, that’s not writer’s block, that’s just me being stressed-out and overwhelmed. At the same time, I think I’ve developed a pretty decent ability to shift my focus rapidly from one thing to another. I’m not one of those people who has to spend three hours just to get their head into a project. I’m more like, “Okay, now it’s time to look at this,” and I can just concentrate on that. I can shift from one thing to the next pretty quickly. I don’t need a long runway to get going.

That’s probably why you’re so productive.

You can’t be prissy about it if you want to write a lot and get a lot of stuff out. You’ve got to be able to just take advantage of the blocks of the time that you have and just do it. Being able to focus and concentrate and tune stuff out makes it a lot easier.

Ok. So your paper is now finished and ready to be submitted. I expect you’ve made many, many submissions throughout your career and you’ve gotten all kinds of R&Rs and…

And also lots and lots of rejects!

Okay! So how do you respond? A decision letter has come into your inbox…

Well, I look at it right away, and try to find out what the answer is.

So as soon as you get it, you open it?

Oh, hell, yeah!

None of this: “Oh, I’ll wait until I’m in a good mood or anything?”

No!! I want to know! That’s even one of the reasons why I try and put the decision in bold in all of my editorial letters, so people can find it faster. I also rewrote my decision letter template to make sure that the decision was in the first or second paragraph. It really has to be on the first page. It drives me crazy when you’re on page 3 and you still don’t know what the decision is.

Let’s say in that first paragraph, because it’s a perfectly written editorial letter, it says, “Sorry, but no.” Then what?

In that case, I’ll probably flip to the part where they list the reasons why. I want to know what the major reasons are. I probably won’t read the reviews right away, but I’ll read the editor’s comments and try to understand what the main factors affecting the editor’s decision were. Of course I’m disappointed, sometimes I’m also angry, especially if I think that there were issues that I could have responded to that weighed more heavily in the editor’s decision than I think they should have. But you know, we’re all annoyed by rejection letters for various reasons. Sometimes though I’ll see stuff and think, “Yeah, they’re right, that makes sense.” After that, I’ll set the letter aside for a little while, and maybe go back to it a day or two later. Then I’ll read the whole thing, I’ll look at the reviews and already, I’ll probably be thinking, “Ok, what do I want to do to this paper before I send it out to the next journal?”

So you’ll resend it?

Oh, yes. I’ve never counted, but I would guess that about half of the papers I’ve submitted got published at the first journal I sent them to, and the other half went to at least one, sometimes two or three, other A journals before they got published. So other than a couple that were like special issue-type things, they made the rounds at all of them. And sometimes I’ll go back to a journal where it got rejected previously for a second shot. The paper has changed enough through the process that it counts as a different paper.

You would have to tell the editors through, right?

Of course. You have to be completely open with the editors. You have to tell them: “This is what it was,” and I’ll give them a copy of the initial submission and say: “Here’s how it’s different.” We’d like to resubmit it here. If you don’t think it’s different enough, we completely understand. I’ve had papers accepted that way.

Okay, that’s kind of cool to know. I think some people wouldn’t dare, you know. They wouldn’t dare go back to a journal where a paper’s been rejected, even though it’s completely different than what it was.

It has to be different. It’s can’t be just window dressing. You’ve got to have different data, a different theory. Duane Ireland wrote an editor’s column on this a few years ago, when he was editor at AMJ (Academy of Management Journal) that laid out what qualifies as a new submission for AMJ. And that’s a really helpful checklist, at least for AMJ. There’s been a couple of instances where I’ve encouraged authors to resubmit papers. I’ve rejected them but said, “If you do what I say in this letter, I think it will qualify.”

That sounds like a reject and resubmit.

It’s a rejection. But it comes with encouragement to eventually send it in as a new submission. It’s not a reject and resubmit but a rejection because AMJ doesn’t do reject and resubmits. But it’s a piece that, in my opinion, I’d like to see published because it touches on a fundamental issue. A lot of times, the problem will be with the data the authors have to collect different data, or come up with a different kind of measure. So I might tell them, “Do these different things, maybe use additional data, change the story here and there.” Does that make it different enough that it passes muster as far as a resubmission is concerned? I don’t know. But then again, that’s Jason’s call (Jason Colquitt), because he’s the editor-in-chief. So in my letter I might write something like, “This is the kind of research I’d like to see published in AMJ, this particular article didn’t work out, but if you’re willing to make these changes and you send in a new submission, I’d be happy to handle it again.”

Okay, so they can ask that you be the one handling it?

Yes. They don’t all advertise it and there’s no guarantee that you’re going to get the editor that you want, but at a lot of journals, if there’s a particular editor that you think is going to be good for your manuscript, tell the editor-in-chief. A lot of times they’ll assign it to that person. If there are potential reviewers that you think would be particularly good, you can suggest them as well. Obviously, don’t be self-serving about it – so your advisor, students or best friend can’t be on that list.

To what do you attribute your success?

Persistence, I think. That’s a big part of it. If you’re going to cry over spilt milk and be all upset, “Oh! I can’t bear to look at this for eight months!” whenever you get bad news, it’s not going to work. Our field is built on bad news, it’s built on rejection. But that’s why the stuff that does get through has supposedly been thoroughly vetted. And that’s also why we trust the peer review process. Getting negative feedback is part of what we do. You’ve got to have a thick skin. So when things don’t work out for me, I’m more like, “Okay, onto the next!” I don’t give up and I’m open to feedback. This is a big part of it. Try and figure out what the issues are and ask yourself: “Can I fix these?” But also ask, “Do I believe in this?” Because you can’t respond to a ton of different suggestions. I’ve seen people who get completely messed up because of too much feedback. They’ve gotten 85 friendly reviews and their paper ends up being this mishmash of all kinds of different stuff. So it’s useful to try and figure out, “What is it that I want to say, and what is it that I don’t want to say?” This should save you from feeling that you have to walk down every avenue that people suggest to you.

How do you manage that though? Contradictory reviews?

Well one trick (and I fall into this trap a lot) is when you’re sending a rejected paper to a new journal, make sure that you don’t rewrite the paper for the reviewers that you’ve just had. Each reviewer has his or her idiosyncratic issues. So if a reviewer made a big deal about something, and in responding to it you also make a big deal out of it, this may become a liability for you in this new round, because other than you having made a big deal out of it, it may not have even occurred to your new reviewers that this was an issue at all. So you want to be judicious about what you respond to. Always ask yourself, “Is this a fundamental issue that I need to deal with, or is this a specific reviewer’s more idiosyncratic concern?”

What would you say are the biggest mistakes that beginners make in terms of the editorial process?

A big mistake is they’re given a clear “you need to do this” recommendation, and they don’t do it. There’s a learning process involved in that too – there are things that are recommended that aren’t “You have to do this or you’re dead”, but there are things that you really must do. So you want to change the paper as much as is necessary to address the issues that have been raised, but you don’t want to change it more than is necessary. You don’t have to follow every recommendation to the letter, especially when you get conflicting recommendations, but you do have to address the spirit of the issue. If somebody didn’t complain about something, then don’t go and change it in a way that it now becomes a problem.

How do you distinguish between an issue that matters and one that doesn’t though?

Ask. If an editor doesn’t tell you in the letter, contact them and ask them. If they still don’t want to tell you, then talk to your senior colleagues who have more experience and get them to help you interpret what you need to do. Also, in your response letter to reviewers, say what you did and why you did it. One of the big things with response letters is you always want to say, “Here is how I responded to something you said.” That way you make them part of the process, they have some ownership in it. If everything in your letter is about why you didn’t do what they asked, that’s a problem.

I’ve noticed that most of what you have written has been co-authored. Can we talk a little about how you collaborate with others?

I don’t like writing alone, I think it’s the least fulfilling way to do research. For me, research is a social activity. I think you get better ideas by discussing them and challenging others with them and so forth. I like to write as a co-author, it’s also a good way to be productive. I’ve co-authored with people that I’ve known very well, like colleagues or my advisor, but also co-authored with people that I hadn’t met personally but whose work I knew, and who contacted me. So we’d have a conversation by phone, and then decide to go ahead and write something together even before we actually met in person. Successful co-authorship depends a lot on good communication – so you need to talk regularly, email regularly. You also have to let your colleagues know when you can or can’t work on something, managing your workflow so that you’ve got something going out to a co-author when they’re ready to work, and something else coming in from another one when you’re ready to work, and so forth, so that you can keep all the pieces moving forward.

In writing with others, do you trade drafts, or do you write together, side by side?

Since my colleagues are all over the country, even the world, I can’t get together physically with them much anymore. I have done two people at different computers, writing the thing together, but most of my co-authoring involves sending stuff back and forth. Sometimes I’ll be working on something, and I’ll pick up the phone and call a co-author and say: “I’m working on this one part, we need to talk about this.” Having the ability to do Skype calls, or being able to physically get together, as in “We’re going to go and work for a day or two on this,” can really help push a project forward. I like to have the face-to-face meetings when I can, but that’s not always possible. So the majority of my co-authoring involves emailing versions back and forth.

Any advice for those who are starting out in the writing/publication process?

Be persistent, and be self-confident. That doesn’t mean be arrogant, but it means drop the “Oh, I’m not good enough, or I’m not smart enough” stuff. Just do it, you know? You have a PhD in some topic so it means you’re probably an expert in that area. Have the confidence to say what you want to say. Also, always use the active voice. It makes a paper much easier to read, and it also buys you space to say the important stuff. Passive constructions are always longer. When you have a page limit, the more precise you are, the more active you are, the more space you have to actually say what is important. Get rid of the words that you don’t need. So be persistent, take ownership of your ideas and write in the active voice!

Epilogue: I want to be clear that when I talk about iterating between the data and theory I’m not talking about data dredging, or only presenting hypotheses that are supported. Quite the contrary. Without theory guiding what you do it’s nearly impossible to tell a coherent story. There’s a theoretical reason why each potential relationship or interaction is considered, and I often end up including hypotheses in the paper that aren’t supported, but that are logically derived from theory and help tell the story. This process is no different than sending a paper out for review and having reviewers ask you to drop certain hypotheses and explore new ones. Just like qualitative researchers, what my colleagues and I are doing is iterating between theory and data to identify the story and help it emerge. What qualitative researchers have that quantitative researchers don’t have is the luxury of admitting in writing their articles that this is how the process occurs (TP).

REFERENCES

Fischer, Harold M. & Pollock, Timothy G. (2004) Effects of social capital and power on surviving transformational change: The case of initial public offerings. Academy of Management Journal, 47: 463.

Grant, Adam M. & Pollock, Timothy G. (2011) From the Editors – Publishing in AMJ – Part 3: Setting the hook. Academy of Management Journal, 54(5): 873.

Ireland, Duane (2009); From the editors: When is a new paper really new?; Academy of Management Journal; 52(1); 9.

Rindova, Violina P., Pollock, Timothy.G. & Hayward, M.L.A. (2006) Celebrity firms: The social construction of market popularity. Academy of Management Review, 31(1): 50.

Wade, James B., Porac, Joseph F. & Pollock, Timothy G. (1997) Worth, words and the justification of executive pay. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 18, 641.